>>>>> Barry Rowlingson <b.rowlingson at lancaster.ac.uk>
>>>>> on Sun, 18 Dec 2011 01:32:52 +0000 writes:
> Scenario: Here I am working away in R. I've got results
> that prove global warming is anthropogenic and also the
> solution for producing limitless carbon-neutral energy
> from nuclear fusion. Its been a good day.
> So, I want to save my work. I don't want to overwrite my
> current .RData, so I save it to another file:
> save(file="prize.RData") # just need to email this to the
> Nobel committee q() Save workspace image? [y/n/c]: - "no"
> I don't want to save the workspace image, I just saved
> everything to "prize.RData". But gee, it did seem to do
> that quite quickly considering the volume of evidential
> data in my work. My unix shell prompt returns.
> Uh oh. See what I did there? I typed 'save' when I meant
> 'save.image'. What does that give me?
> A 42 byte, empty, latest.RData, and because there was no
> warning or error I quit without saving it
> again. Oops. Massive Data Loss.
> Is there any reason why save(file="file.RData") couldn't
> warn or error if you try and save nothing? There's no
> obvious check in the R code for save.
> Barry
> PS the above scenario is fictional.
really? ;-)
well, after *not* save()ing all your findings, it wouldn't have
been such a good day, would it?
well, in spite of that.
I agree that save() should warn or stop in that case.
I have now committed a version -- to R-devel only --
which stop()s if 'pretest=TRUE' and uses warning() otherwise,
e.g., in the case of save.image() when there's nothing to save.
Thank you, Barry. for the suggestion!
Martin
> When did I last have a good day?
(I wish you more of those..)